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Elektron Machinedrum SPS-1UW

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Machinedrum SPS-1

This is a programmer's drum machine, 'nuff said...
Well, you can forget about the presets which are just full of short click-clack sounds and laser-zap hard bass kicks. I want fat bass kicks (I do have a TR-909) and powerful long snares, luckily you can get that with the Machinedrum - it just needs to be programmed. It has 16 voices per drum set and each of them can be tweaked and fine tuned like hell - which I really like! The synthesizing part is great for dynamic drums, making drums sound as dynamic as possible is important and you can also set a LFO to do stuff like random pitch or other parameters separately on each of the sounds. One thing I which it had was velocity sensitive filter envelopes as it would also add a great deal of dynamic to the sound. It also has an onboard sequencer, but I use it mostly as a sound module controlled by MIDI.
At the time was I into getting a drum machine, it was either Machinedrum or Jomox Xbase09. Since I already had the TR-909, the Machinedrum seemed like the right choice.
My Machinedrum is now upgraded to the UW (User Wave) version which allows 2 MB of sampling memory distributed over 32 slots. It's not much, but having sampling was absolutely necessary on the Machinedrum so I had to do it. With just 2 MB of sampling memory you have to be really careful about what you put in and it's actually enough for short drum sounds, but I whish it was 4 MB - for those nice long cymbals and loops. The very first samples I loaded into it were of course the LinnDrum samples! I've used it do drums in most of the stuff I've made after I bought it; it's a real "drum shaper"!

Audio samples